Clicky Archive

Today Google announced the launch of real-time analytics within their Google Analytics service. I’ve been in the web analytics area since the first beta of Webtrends and am glad to see Google finally offering a real-time feature as part of their very popular metrics offering. Real-time stats are critical when you run ad campaigns or are now using social media tools to help spread your marketing messages. When you monitor real-time stats, you can make changes on-the-fly to your campaigns to optimize the heck out of your spend. I also hear from other bloggers that they use real-time metrics tools to monitor for traffic based on adjustments to story titles to see which provide a better response.

Naturally today’s Google Analytics announcement must mean that real-time analytics tools including Clicky, Chartbeat, SiteMeter, Woopra and ExtremeTracking are dead. Maybe these tools should consider a quick pivot to real-time daily deals (I kid!).

Blogger Holden Page immediately noted, “Google Analytics went real-time. In one fell swoop hit about four startups, one of which I use religiously (Clicky) with an iron fist.”

I like the blog post by the Clicky team – they always use pepper sarcasm into their posts. The title of their blog post reads, “SHUT. DOWN. EVERYTHING.”

They note, “Hmm… did anyone actually read the announcement that Google made today? This isn’t “real time Google Analytics”, this is a single report in GA that is real time. The rest of GA remains the same. This is more akin to Chartbeat, to be used as a real time compliment to a standard analytics package, rather than a full standalone real time service like Clicky is. But I guarantee you Chartbeat will be just fine, as will everyone else. We’ve all had, and continue to have, plenty of advantages over GA other than real time data.”

They then link to a number of tweets that signal death for Clicky, Woopra and Chartbeat. The quotes include:

• “Sites like Clicky will soon be out of business”
• “getclicky and chartbeat ought to run for the hills”
• “Is this the beginning of the end of Woopra?”
• “Google killing off Chartbeat”

I am still waiting to see proof where death of a service occurred because a large company put out an offering in that space. I guess the closest we could come would be all those tools that built on top of Twitter only to have Twitter build their own – but remember I warned against that many moons ago.

Continue reading “Chartbeat, Clicky & Other Real-Time Analytics Tools Must Be Dead…Right?” »

The big news in the social media expert camp from last week was the notification that all links that are posted on Twitter, both on the website and using a third-party app, will now automatically be converted to use Twitter’s official t.co URL shortener. You can read the Twitter help post and the developer guide to learn more about t.co and how it works. Part of the conversation around the t.co rollout reminds me of some of the discussion when Digg launched the Diggbar.

Short tl:dr version: Just because a t.co url appears in your referral log, it does not mean that all the traffic to that url has come from Twitter.

Sean at the analytics service Clicky posted about how the change to use t.co will make it appear that Twitter has zero influence because the referral logs will show t.co instead of twitter.com going forward. When I initially read the post, I thought there was something wrong but couldn’t put my finger on it at the time. Yesterday Zee at the Next Web (note: they are a Twitter default user) created a post titled, “Twitter Just Got the Respect it Deserves”. He continues along the same lines as Clicky and has several key points:

• Twitter is now influential in terms of traffic from an “eyes of the media” standpoint
• Facebook and Stumbleupon better watch out because now Twitter will appear really big as a social media traffic driver
• Brands and businesses will now take note of how influential Twitter is
• You can search to find out which tweet was the influential one because you can search on a specific t.co url

Unfortunately it looks like there are issues with both the Clicky post (and the very wrong change they made to their service) and Zee’s statements.

Continue reading “Behavior Patterns of Twitter’s T.Co URL Shortener and Why Zee/Clicky Are Wrong” »

I’ve been a fan of web analytics startup Clicky since the beginning. This week they announced a new partnership with Olark that will allow you to chat with your customers and users in real-time. Olark is a Y-Combinator startup that offers a widget which you can place on your site to allow for chat with your customers and/or users.

In all of my years dealing with web analytics, I can’t remember ever seeing an integration like this new Clicky/Olark functionality. Clicky offers a real-time analytics monitoring service called Spy which offers you the ability to watch your traffic in real-time. It can be very addicting, especially if your blog post or startup get some good links or press.

There are plenty of companies that offer popup customer chat windows – I know when I visit the Rackspace site I try to login very quickly so I don’t get hit with a popup chat box.

The new service makes it possible to chat with your customers or users by clicking on their link in the Spy.

A simple use case for this new service is watching a potential customer move around the site and then clicking to chat with them to close the sale. Another use case would be watching a user navigate through a number of pages in your support documentation — click to chat with them to directly answer their questions and be a hero.

To use the new service, you must have a premium account with Clicky (starts at $10/month) and you must have an account with Olark. Olark has a free account which is limited to 20 conversations a month and their paid subscriptions start at $15/month.

Continue reading “Clicky Partners With Olark for Live Real-Time Customer Chat” »

I’ve been a fan of web analytics startup Clicky since the beginning. Last month the company announced their new video analytics functionality.  This week the company announced a beta test of a new interface to their web analytics product. I guess Twitter wasn’t the only one who launched a new Web interface this week. The new interface is available at beta.getclicky.com.

The Clicky blog explains the changes to the analytics interface which include:

• Ajax page loads which make the pages load faster and smoother
• navigation that changes based on the context of the page
• important stats for each report remain visible as you scroll

My favorite part of Clicky is the real-time spy. The spy lets you watch traffic to, and on, your website in real-time.

Continue reading “Clicky Web Analytics Launches New Interface” »

Web analytics service Clicky has announced the launch of their video analytics service which is part of the overall Clicky web analytics platform. Clicky has integrated directly with video hosting company Viddler and provides the ability to track videos from YouTube and Vimeo as well.

The Viddler integration will go live sometime in August as Clicky notes that the Viddler team has some additional work on their end before the connection is made live. The Viddler integration will not require you do anything different to make sure the video stats reach Clicky.

To use the YouTube connection with Clicky, there is a bit of work involved. You can read about the changes to your blog or website that must be added on the Clicky help site. It addition, the way you embed videos is different than just copying and pasting the code directly from YouTube into your blog. The same goes for Vimeo…you would need to add some code to your templates and then change the way you insert videos into your blog or website.

Here’s an example of the stats page:

Note – we are an affiliate for Clicky but none of the links in this post are affiliate links.

Web analytics service Clicky has announced the launch of a URL shortener. I don’t write much about URL shorteners because frankly they are way over-hyped. Dave Winer has been posting a lot about the category so check out his blog for more information and education.

In my scan this morning for the Today’s 10, I noticed that Clicky is now offering a URL shortener of their own. The difference with the Clicky shortener (clicky.me) is that it’s directly tied into your Clicky analytics account. You must have a Clicky account to use the shortener.

They compare the Clicky shortener to the Twitter default shortener Bit.ly. Clicky notes that the biggest difference is that Bit.ly stops tracking the user when they arrive to your site while Clicky continues to track the user within their analytics tool. Maybe one day Twitter will allow users to select which shortener we want to use though that’s doubtful especially with their recent click tracking test.

Clicky now allows for segmentation of users and data by short url. They also boast that their offering only tracks humans not evil bots, search robots and other Internet crud.

In typical Clicky fashion they discuss the revenue model for Clicky.me. There isn’t one – well that’s not completely true. There won’t be any direct revenue from the offering but it should drive new users to the Clicky service and will strengthen the overall offering.

One of the comments on the announcement post wonders if spammers will use it since the shortener will work with the free version. If they moved it to paid-only plans, the new offering could help with conversions.

I’ve been using moourl for my shortening needs as it’s quick and has a cow on the page. The only real suggestion I have for all of the shorteners is to offer the preview option that TinyURL does. I never have a worry clicking a TinyURL as I know I will hit a page from which I can decide to proceed. Bit.ly apparently only offers this if you hack the URL (wtf) and I don’t know if Clicky’s offering allows for a preview but here’s hoping they add it. Safety will become more important with short URLs as more of the evil gets a hold of them. 

Continue reading “Clicky Launches Powerful Integrated URL Shortener” »

Day 4 in the Ten Days of Holiday Gifts features Clicky. Clicky describes the service as, "Clicky gives bloggers and smaller web sites a more personal understanding of their visitors. Many analyzers give good summaries, and Clicky is no different – but the similarities stop there. Clicky stands out with its refreshingly clean and simple interface, innovative features like Spy and RSS feeds, and an unrivaled per visitor level of detail. You also get real time stats, outbound link tracking, download tracking, IP tagging, custom data tracking, and much more."

Check out the feature list and comparison to other analytics tools. We use Clicky on CN and you can read all of our Clicky coverage along with our interview with founder Sean Hammons.

Clicky is offering Three (3) Free Professional Accounts for the life of the account! To enter for one of the accounts, send in an entry using our contact form. We will select three winners at the end of next week.

Note: I’ve turned off comments on this post to avoid any entry confusion – also, we are an affiliate of Clicky but I have turned off all affiliate links on this post.